Thankful Thursday
Jun. 26th, 2025 12:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mdlbearToday I am thankful for...
- Cooler weather.
- My cats being helpful (see, e.g., this incident.). Also, little furry alarm clocks. (Though, unfortunately, Bronx does not have a snooze button.)
- Good customer service. Special thanks to Sweetwater. NO thanks to FedEx. Also no thanks to my stupid mistakes with the order. The main one being trusting FedEx.
- Pretty good airflow. Using the kitchen's hood fan with the back sliding door is a hack, but it's a working hack.
- A new website building and maintenance project that will Make Money for HSX.
- Leftovers for lunch, and occasionally dinner. Not today, unfortunately.
- A fridge with a working ice-maker.
- A telehealth appointment with my oncologist getting rescheduled automagically after yesterday's outage.
aha!
Jun. 26th, 2025 01:30 amtwistedchickI have been watching 'Elementary' the past week or so, especially during the heat dome of the last few days, and throughout the first three seasons Holmes' father is mentioned a few times but never shows up.
He finally does show up early in season 4, and from the first moment I saw him I kept thinking, 'where do I know this actor from'? His face, older and lined, was like many other actors, but that voice was singular.
So I looked him up.
He played Denethor in LOTR, the bad father who tried to burn his younger son to death and immolate himself on the fire as well -- the worst of the fathers in LOTR.
Tone down the madness, make him a high-level businessman with a finger in every government, and you have Sherlock's father. Pretty good casting.
He finally does show up early in season 4, and from the first moment I saw him I kept thinking, 'where do I know this actor from'? His face, older and lined, was like many other actors, but that voice was singular.
So I looked him up.
He played Denethor in LOTR, the bad father who tried to burn his younger son to death and immolate himself on the fire as well -- the worst of the fathers in LOTR.
Tone down the madness, make him a high-level businessman with a finger in every government, and you have Sherlock's father. Pretty good casting.
Done Since 2025-06-15
Jun. 22nd, 2025 11:08 ammdlbearWelcome to the start of summer, and maybe of WWIII. This post that came across my Mastodon feed this morning kind of says it all:
You don't have to prefix things with "doom" anymore, that's just the default now. You can just say scrolling.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, ...
I had my oncology appointment; I'll be getting a hormone injection (tomorrow, and apparently they do house calls for that) rather than continuing with abiraterone (which insurance won't cover because not metastatic). It's good for six months, which will take me through the end of my 2-year course of treatment. I'm okay with this.
Last night I fell down a rabbit-hole troubleshooting my little script that prints out the URL of one's last post. See this commit. Pretty sure I can blame AI bots for that problem.
I fell down another rabbit-hole Friday, which started by looking for the overture to Wagner's opera Der fliegende Holländer. Turns out that J. Slauerhoff, whom our street is named after, wrote a poem about it. It's in his book, Eldorado. I expect to have a little fun trying to translate it. (And note in passing that doom is also mentioned in that connection.)
ysabetwordsmith has some good links about dealing with Heat. It was supposed to hit 30C (90F) today, but it looks like we may be getting a thunderstorm instead. It'll still be too hot indoors.
Thankful Thursday
Jun. 19th, 2025 11:42 ammdlbearToday I am thankful for...
- My keyboard arriving last Friday without any problems. NO thanks to FedEx, which has failed to deliver m's keyboard to their home in Seattle. Twice.
- Remembering a very little bit of how to sight-read.
- Finally solving my audio input problem. NO thanks to Zoom and Audacity, which fail in entirely orthogonal ways to sanely handle my UA-25.
- Thanks to them, however, for at least allowing the system default as a device. Differently, of course.
- Linux command-line tools, including (but not limited to) Grep, Find,
Ls, Sed, and of course Bash, for always being there when I need to do
some trivial but off-the-wall bit of data-mining. Like listing all Thankful Thursday
posts with fewer than four list items.
$ for f in ../2*/*/*thank*; do echo $(grep "li>" $f | wc -l) $f; done |grep ^[2-3] 3 ../2019/09/12--thankful-thursday.html 3 ../2020/06/05--thankful-friday.html 3 ../2020/06/25--thankful-thursday.html 3 ../2021/04/25--thankful-sunday.html 3 ../2022/02/24--thankful-thursday.html 2 ../2025/01/03--thankful-thursday-addendum.html 2 ../2025/06/12--thankful-thursday.html
NO thanks to 2025!me for continued procrastination., and NO thanks to 2022!me, for letting the MakeStuff/music toolchain languish with no maintenance and inadequate documentation, making it way harder than necessary to put a two-song concert set online. Which might get done this week.
Scent of the Day: Hoth Chocolate (The Nerf Herder Co)
Jun. 18th, 2025 02:48 pmtwotone
My wrist STILL smells like lemon lime (I'm beginning to think the oil got into my Fitbit and is re-applying itself to my wrist every time I put the Fitbit on) so I sprayed the Hoth Chocolate fragrance mist on the insides of my elbows, and...
It's cold? I'm getting a cold-burn feeling like I get from Icy Hot. I'm torn between "is this safe to spray on my skin???" and "actually this might feel nice on a hot sweaty summer's day", but I guess it's a moot point because currently, Hoth Chocolate is only available as a candle, a wax melt, and this 10 mL sample. (Maybe it'll be back as a fragrance spray during the winter season?)
Scent wise, there's definitely a fudgy chocolate note and also a very sweet vanilla mint. One sniff and I immediately thought "I have this scent already!" I'm going to have to do some digging in my multi-tiered perfume oil box to figure out which specific scent this reminds me of, but off the top of my head:
- Possets Luminaria (2007, vanilla mint)(re-tested on 6/20, immediately went plasticky)
- BPAL Tokyo Stomp (2007, stronger vanilla mint)
- Blooddrop's Peppermint Whipped Cream or Peppermint Hot Chocolate or Peppermint Bark (2015, varying degrees of peppermint and chocolate/white chocolate)(re-tested on 6/20, Peppermint Bark initially had the edge in terms of rich creamy almost fudgy white-chocolate and peppermint, but Peppermint Hot Chocolate pulled even at the last moment)
For whatever reason, Hoth Chocolate is dying down to a powdery sweet mint on my right elbow and a stronger medicinal mint on my left elbow. Both elbows are still burning slightly, nearly an hour after application.
Official description from The Nerf Herder Co (taken from the page for the candle):
We love a good pun here at The Nerf Herder Co., so we couldn't resist creating some delicious Hoth Chocolate for you all. And y'all... this is so delicious that we have to keep reminding ourselves to not eat the wax or drink the melted wax.
Peppermint is the star of the show and will make any room feel clear and bright. However, there is a beautiful undercurrent of rich chocolate (believe us that this isn't a cheap smelling chocolate) that grounds the peppermint and reminds us of a delicious cup of peppermint hot chocolate. Hold on while we go make ourselves a cup.
FRAGRANCE INFORMATION
Scent: Peppermint + Cocoa Shavings
Fragrance Notes: Peppermint, Vanilla Bean, Chocolate, Nutmeg, Coffee Beans, Whipped Cream
Scent Strength: Strong
I'm not currently getting any nutmeg, but given what I've experienced of The Nerf Herder Co's fragrance-crafting style, I am confident that the nutmeg and coffee beans will help make this scent a little more grown-up and complex, assuming they're present in the fragrance spray and not just the candle. Not that I'm knocking any of my beloved foodie/gourmand perfume oils! Sometimes I feel like surrounding myself with straight-up foodie scents, sometimes I want it to be a little more nuanced.
PS: I love that the label has a little AT-AT walker as the T in Hoth Chocolate.
Scent of the Day: Blue Milk (The Nerf Herder Co)
Jun. 16th, 2025 03:40 pmtwotone
Wow I wish I could figure out how to adjust the focus of my image previews
Anyhow. My wrist still smells like lemon lime, so I sprayed this on the insides of my elbows. And... this is more like it! It's sweet and fruity and tropical! The perfect summertime scent! Does it actually smell like blue milk? That's... hard to say. The Blue Milk that's served at Star Wars' Galaxy Edge is a plant-based frozen concoction that's very sweet, and I usually get it as a Tenoo Swirls Crunchies Cereal (with a gooey raspberry jelly swirl, plus rainbow nerds sprinkled on top), which adds some tartness and texture that regular Blue Milk lacks. I also generally prefer green milk, which is a little more citrus-y.
This is the last item in the Culinary Trip Around the Galaxy #1 sampler box... which is a shame, because judging from the candle catalogue, The Nerf Herder Co has a bunch of other Galaxy's Edge-themed scents that don't seem to be available in fragrance spray form. There's Cold Brew Black Caf (a cold brew coffee topped with cream and served with Cocoa Puffs on top), Meiloorun Juice (a fruit juice), Jabba Juice (a non-alcoholic beverage served at Oga's Cantina) and maybe more. I wonder if they're waiting for enough scents to make a third Culinary Trip Around the Galaxy sampler box, or if those scents have some element that makes it harder to transition them from candle to fragrance spray.
Here's the official description from The Nerf Herder Co:
Blue milk. That weird thing we all first saw in "A New Hope" and we wondered what the heck Luke, Aunt Beru, and Uncle Owen were drinking.
Cue Disney stepping in and saying "I gotchu. Try a cup of this," and thus we were introduced to the tropical frozen drink available in Galaxy's Edge.
Now, who's to say the Blue Milk in the Star Wars films was meant to be fruity, but we're going to roll with it. This scent is delightfully tropical and will be perfect in the summer when you want to kick back and zen out.
FRAGRANCE INFORMATION
Scent: Sweet Pineapple + Mango Zest
Fragrance Notes: Sweet Pineapple, Acai Berry, Mango Zest, Passion Fruit, Yuzu Zest, Green Apple, Orchid Leaves, and White Musk
Scent Strength: 57.1% of respondents in a survey of 22 people felt that scent was STRONG
Category: Fruity